Crazy how many engineers in here just say they are using another prompt on top. From my experience that makes things worse. It does abstractions, but the wrong ones. It overcomments, confusing future calls of the LLM.

To me building on multiple scalable systems this has been the most dangerous part of LLMs. On a good codebase it will work good, but it will maek it worse, so you keep using it, till it doesnt work and then you have to pay the bill and fix for what you didn’t build before.

If you put an agent on a fresh codebase 2 things are often given:

-> You have a mental model of the code -> The code is somewhet concise

After multiple iterations both is lost and LLM performance degrades. To solve this you can regular refactor, but it’s not a nice experienc. So my best solution is:

I use LLMs for exploration and for review, but I write the code myself. I find it hard to believe why so many engineers try to avoid it. It’s not consuming much of my time. And it’s actually the most enjoyable part.

Sometimes I race AI i give it a prompt /bug to fix and at the sametime im greping/symboling through the codebase and tryto fix it myself. AI isn’t always faster.